We Need To Talk launched for The Eve Appeal

I’m delighted to have a story featured in the anthology We Need to Talk, launched yesterday. The publisher is Jurassic London—here’s the blurb from their website:

All of us, at some point, are involved in difficult conversations. Whether that’s tough talks with clients or bosses, or break-ups, or coming out, or telling someone you love them, or giving advice to that friend who just doesn’t want to hear it. Some conversations are even more difficult, as sufferers of any potentially serious illness will know.

But one thing’s for sure, these conversations are fascinating. So much so that we’ve teamed up with Kindred and The Eve Appeal, to launch a writing competition on the theme of difficult conversations.

My story is called ‘Frozen Out’, an awkward conversation between a husband and wife. Its inclusion in the anthology is all the sweeter because the other eighteen stories are uniformly excellent.

All profits from the sale of the book are being donated to The Eve Appeal to help fund its important work fighting women’s cancers. Hard copies of the book are available from Foyles, either in-store or via their online shop. You can get an e-book version from Amazon.

We Need To Talk is an awareness raising project, so let’s be aware. The Eve Appeal chief executive Athena Lamnisos wrote the afterword for the book, and it was published earlier this week on the Huffington Post, under the title ‘We Need To Talk About Vaginas‘.

We are ambitious for a future where no woman delays seeing her GP due to the intimate nature of her symptoms. A future where women of all ages know about the early signs and symptoms of all five gynaecological cancers and know where to go for more information. At The Eve Appeal, we encourage all women to listen to their bodies, look out for any changes and see their doctor if something does not feel right. I’m outraged that women are literally dying from embarrassment. …

Embarrassment and a lack of awareness of the early symptoms of gynæcological cancers are the reasons for the low detection rates, which in turn means that, appallingly, the death rate from these cancers has remained steady:

The statistics are brutal and what’s really tragic is that so little has changed for some of the gynae cancers where so much progress has been made for other health conditions. Deaths from lung cancer and heart diseases have halved since 1970. Over the same period of time, deaths from breast cancer have gone down by 40%. If you’re diagnosed today with late stage ovarian cancer, your prognosis is pretty much the same as it would have been 30 years ago.